Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

cults, continued...

"There seems to be a human fascination with secrets. Secrets and secret societies have abounded throughout history, some relating to entire classes of people, as with initiation rites for young men; some relating to religion, as with the 'mystery' cults of the Hellenic world, and some relating to specialized interests... fraternities... "

Pg. 104: "From the early Wright flyers to shortly after World War II, the U.S. raised the dream of flight to something beyond a cult; we viewed flight almost as a religion. We lionized Doolittle, Lindbergh, Earhart, and Halliburton. "; Pg. 105: "Just as Martin Luther once stirred the world with his new wrinkles on an old religion, the ultralights have produced a storm of controversy among followers of the winged gospel... But a latter-day gospel of flight is growing now, and Princeton's Gerard O'Neill is one of its prophets. "

Justin rubbed his hands together over his cup, as if for warmth. 'Cult activities, real cult activities, usually have more of a motivation. An ultimate goal, whether it's bilking believers of their worldly possessions, setting up some ultimate retreat from the wicked world, or even planning for some apocalypse.'

'Jim Jones,' said the policewoman.

'Correct,' continued Justin, acting very much like the professor he claimed to be, 'What you have here is just a group of kids playing Meet the Devil. Without the fire, they would have just gotten drunk and hauled themselves home at a late hour. Real cultists, the ones who think in terms of poison Kool-Aid, don't work like that. They need artifacts to give themselves some sense of legitimacy. Artifacts like this 'dingus.'...' "curious.' "

"'Most 'cult experts' are quick to find evil influence everywhere and in everything. And aren't shy about talking about it, particularly to the media. You seem unwilling to find the devil here. I find that curious.'

Justin gave a theatrical sigh. 'A lot of your 'cult experts' are looking for their next big score, their next book and their next talk show tour. They fearlessly sound the alarm when there is no danger, in order to paint themselves as protectors. Were I that type I would have brought the papers with me. I'm not. I've helped local law enforcement groups before, and that's probably why someone gave you my name. I know my business, and how to keep quiet.' "

[Book jacket.] "Mystic and historian, Sir Adam Sinclair is Master of the Hunt, leader of a secret brotherhood at war with the dark and unholy Powers of our world... He is the Adept.

Now, he faces his greatest challenge. An evil cult older than Christianity itself--the Phurba--is dedicated to reviving the all-too-modern horror that was Nazi Germany. On the northern coast of Ireland, deep within a sea cave, the corroded hulk of a World War II German submarine has been discovered... They have the power to make Aryan world conquest a terrifying reality--if there is a worthy successor. And the ancient order of the Phurba--the Dagger Cult--has the perfect person for the job: the Man with Green Gloves. Only the Adept can prevent this evil from taking root. Only he can prevent the spawning of a new, demonic Third Reich... " [Other refs. throughout book, not in DB.]

"Happily, though Strieber had a commercial success with Communion, his effort to form a quasi-religious cult of alien abductees did not attain orbital velocity, and so more than a decade after his alleged abduction on the night after Christmas 1985, Communion has become a part of the history of pop culture, not of religion. "

"James Wolcott, reviewing a recent tome of UFO lore in the New Yorker, describes his own close encounters with 'abductees':

They bugged me. I came to feel that I was dealing with a quasi-cult of deluded cranks. The abductees I interviewed, far from being people plucked out of the ordinary workday, had browsed the entire New Age boutique of reincarnation, channeling, auras, and healing crystals. . . . For them the aliens were agents of spiritual growth [but beneath that] was a pinched righteousness...

"...the pilgrims to Roswell, New Mexico, that Oz of UFO believers; the buffs of Atlantis and Mu; the followers of L. Ron Hubbard; the Heaven's Gate and Aum Shinrikyo cults. All these cults owe their origins, more or less directly, to the specific fabulations of SF writers. Even the Roswell case, which would seem a genuine instance of 'mistaken identity'... " [Also pg. 141-144, 159-162, elsewhere.]

cults

world

1999

Banks, Iain. The Business. New York: Simon & Schuster (1999); pg. 98.

"According to which one [Web site] you choose to believe, we [the Business] are either:... a well-funded cabal of the little known Worshippers of Nostradamus cult intent on bringing about the end of the financial world through a roughly similar strategy to that of the International Marxists (which may or may not imply a rethink for this plucky group of theorists if we do all make it past the millennium) "

"Priests and ministers implicated our campaign with the international Satanist/Communist/Corporate/Secular Humanist conspiracy. Rabbis, imams, and assorted shamans hinted that only the Christian God would die on the Christian New Year. The brahmans sat quietly knowing--or pretending to. The nut cults came farther out of the woodwork. "

"The final decade of Earth's twentieth century was cataclysmic... Christian splinter cults around the world engaged in every imaginable form of social disobedience to hasten the long-overdue Millennium, but there was no Second Coming. Their indiscretions rubbed off on all Christians. "

"Some artifacts have the power to dive men mad. Perhaps the most famous examples are Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the hideous statues of Easter Island. Crackpot theories--even quasi-religious cults--have flourished around all three. "

"Wayne Dupree [the Texan] had, it turned out, come from an extremist Christian group who believed the Blue children were the spawn of Satan, or some such, and so required destruction. He had gotten himself into the center on a fake resume and references from other members of his cult group: credentials that, Maura agreed, the most minimally competent vetting process should have weeded out. " [More.]

"On the way over to McGregor's, Bysshe told me what he'd found out about the Cyclists. 'They're not a cult. There's no religious connection. They seem to have grown out of a pre-Liberation women's group,' he said, looking at his notes... "

"The ideology of the Servants of Wrath connected with the Augustinian view of women; there was fear involved, and then of course the dogma got entangled with the old cult of Mani, the Albigensian Heresy of Provincal France, the Catharists... Catharist knights who had actually... it had been a cult ruthlessly wiped out by Innocent III, and perhaps rightly so. But-- For all its excesses, the Albigensian knight-poets had known the worth of women... "

[People preparing to go to a new world, off the Earth.] "'Most of these--organizations... want everything you own. I mean, look around. Every one of them is like a religion. Worse than a religion. A cult. You have to pledge all. Your property, your life, all your time. Instead of worshipping Goddess, they worship . . . a way out.'

'Or a change,' said Mabel. 'You know, taking humanity to the next level, all that... To tell the truth, we don't have room for anyone else. And we don't need any more money. But what we do need is people so spread the world about us after we leave. To receive whatever messages we might manage to send. For one thing, we'll be able to get messages from the moon colony, at least for a while, and we can send them back, coded. So that the government won't try and intercept them.' "

cults

world

2025

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam (1992); pg. 192.

"'...speaking in tongues?'...'glossolalia'...Pagan Greeks did it--Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it...Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana...' " [Other refs., not all in DB.]

cults

world

2030

Hogan, James P. Entoverse. New York: Ballantine (1991); pg. 30.

"'...The reason we didn't do the same was that the Jevlenese retarded Earth's development by infiltrating agents to spread irrational belief systems and organize cults based on superstition and unreason. That's why it took us two thousand years to get from Euclid to Newton.' "

"'...statistical theology... It was the final assault on the problem of Evil. What brought it to a head was the rise of a very eccentric cult--they called themselves Neo-Manichees, don't ask me to explain why--around 2050. Incidentally, it was the first 'orbital religion'; although all the other faiths had used communications satellites to spread their doctrines, the NMs relied on them exclusively. They had no meeting place except the television screen...' "

"The proliferation of cult movements in the latter half of the twenty-first century set the stage for the technological refinements and sophistication in the present runaway spread of such groups as the Raj Dood following on Venus. That such blind manifestations display the corruption and hypocrisy found in earlier cultish power centers did not surprise your investigators.

"The anthropologist was amused. 'Oh, yes. Tree cults were almost universal in the ancient world. The Druids had an entire alphabet for divination based on trees and shrubs. It was apparently a relic of a more widespread tree-centered religion that derived from utmost antiquity. Scandinavians revered a mighty ashtree named Yggdrasil. Greeks dedicated the ash to the sea-god Poseidon. Birches were sacred among the Romans. The rowan was a Celtic and Greek symbol of power over death. The hawthorn was associated with sex orgies and the month of May--and so was the apple. Oak trees were cult objects all over preliterate Europe. For some reason, oaks are especially vulnerable to lightning, so the ancients connected the tree with the thunder-god. Greeks, Romans, Gaulish Celts, the British, Teutons, Lithuanians, Slavs--they all held the oak to be sacred. The folklore of almost all European countries featured supernatural beings that dwelt in special trees...' "

"'Some features of this time could have been predicted. Sexual permissiveness was one, although no one could have seen how far it would go. But then no one could have foreknown of the Panamorite sect, even if America has spawned lunatic-fringe cults as a frog spawns tadpoles. Yesterday's monomaniac is tomorrow's messiah, and so Sheley and his disciples survived through years of persecution and today their precepts are embedded in our culture.' "

"I really doubt whether any human culture could ever have sustained precisely this attitude toward sexual congress for long. I'm aware that free-love cults have sprung up from time to time and place to place, but the meaning of sex, the charge on it, must have been different. "

"...Venezuela... It was there, for the first time, that I came into close contact with Thanaticisim [sic]. The original Thanatic cults had flourished in the twenty-eighth century. They had appeared among the last generation of children born without Zaman transformations; their members were people who, denied emortality through blastular engineering, had perversely elected to reject the benefits of rejuvenation too, making a fetish out of living only a 'natural' lifespan. At the time, it had seemed likely that they would be the last of the man Millenarian cults which had long afflicted Western culture, and they had quite literally died out some eighty or ninety years before I was born. "

"'Details continue to surface concerning the surprising life of Buford T. Hollis, the heroic costumed adventurer now known to Americans as Razorback... Hollis has been a star athlete, trucker, adventurer,... friend to controversial costumed superhuman Spider-man, cult buster... "

cults

Zuul

2176

Dietz, William C. Steelheart. New York: Ace Books (1998); pg. 5.

"The humans, who had been led to expect something verging on paradise, had arrived only to find that Zuul had been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. First by the Forerunners, whose ruins still dotted the surface of the planet, then by members of a religious cult that the rest of the Zid race found so repugnant that they forced the entire membership into sleep capsules, and sent them to a then-unpopulated planet. "

[Frontispiece] "But the third Sister, who is also the youngest--! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high...

"Livia a silver cymbal, and Dimi knew they had come from the temple of Cybele. He hoped something had been said for the servant girl's soul. " [Also pg. 61.]

Cybele the Great Mother

Gaia

2046

Bear, Greg. Eternity. New York: Warner Books (1988); pg. 99.

"Had she been less protected, a bit more worldly and less enshrouded by the Hypateion gymnasion's code of behavior, one of those boys might have been her first lover. The Great Mother knows she had had enough caresses and kisses stolen from her. "

Pg. 120: "When it was clear the Great Mother was through picking over the eggs and had fallen back into sleep, the crowd surged forward to clean up the nest and its scattered contents. Each person took an egg or a handful of sand as a souvenir. The dragon was shooed back to her stall with her hatchlings. " [This novel has few or no references to real-world religions or cultures. Summary, from title page: "Falsely accused of sabotage, Jakkin and Akki are sent out to certain death in the wilderness of the planet Austar IV but, through the heroic sacrifice of Jakkin's dragon and the help of her offspring, not only manage to survive but gain unusual powers and insights. "]

"Thralen stopped pacing, and rested his hands on the back of Data's chair.

He then told Data of his own experiences with religious disputes, revealing more than Data had ever learned before of the ship's sociologist: his own family had rejected Thralen when he pursued a course of study opposed to their fundamentalist beliefs in the Great Mother. "

Pg. 12: "'Though healing is mine, I cannot heal you, nor would I if I could; by the shrine of the Great Mother you fell, to a shrine of hers you must return. Then she will point the way, and in the end of the wolf's tooth will return to her who sent it.' "; Pg. 17: "'...My guess is that when you've visited the Great Mother in Trophonius's Cave, everything will be clear. Not that it's possible for a mortal--' "; Pg. 18: "'I was afraid... Afraid they'd cut my neck like they do the poor animals, and today I've been afraid the god sent me to you to be a sacrifice someplace else. Do they kill little children for this Great Mother the poet is taking us to see?' " [Many other refs., not in DB, although refs. are to 'Great Mother,' and mention of 'Cybele'.]

"'Also it was when Rome had already become the world's first million-city that the Eastern mystery religions with their concomitant self-privation and self-mutiliation took hold. You fell in behind the procession honouring Cybele, you seized a knife from one of the priests, you cut your balls off and ran through the streets waving them till you came to a house with the door open when you threw them over the threshold. They gave you an outfit of women's clothing and you joined the priesthood. Reflect on the pressure that drove you to think that was the easy way out!'

"'No mortal can touch the ultimate deity. You who live in flesh see with the eyes of the world, one thing at a time, and so you see God in many guises, just as different images are reflected in the many facets of a jewel. To each facet you have given a form and a name--Apollo or Ammon, Cybele or Hera, who once gave oracles at this shrine. Jahweh of the Jews watches over his people... "

Cybele the Great Mother

Roman Empire

359 C.E.

Anderson, Poul. The Boat of a Million Years. New York: Tor (1989); pg. 33.

"A hunchbacked beggar whined for alms in the name of Christ and then, when likewise ignored, tried Jupiter, Mithras, Isis, the Great Mother, and Celtic Epona... "

"If those at Arthur's court at Camelot chose to think me so when I came there [a nun] (since I always wore the dark robes of the Great Mother in her guise as wise-woman), I did not undeceive them... I could greet Arthur at last, when he lay dying, not as my enemy and the enemy of my Goddess, but only as my brother, and as a dying man in need of the Mother's aid, where all men come at last. Even the priests know this, with their ever-virgin Mary in her blue robe; for she too becomes the World Mother in the hour of death. " [Other refs. to the 'Great Mother', not in DB. By not referred to as 'Cybele', so this may simply be another name for a more generic goddess.]

[Year estimated.] "'Artemis of Ephesus is a divine goddess and because she took me under her protection when I arrived in Ephesus I owe her my life. In recent years, however, the black goddess Cybele of Lydia has begun to compete for favor with the Hellenes' Artemis. The Ionians are a frivolous people, always seeking new experiences, and during the rule of the Persians many of them traveled to Sardis to sacrifice to Cybele and participate in her shameful secret rites. When I joined the Athenian expedition I was told, and had full reason to believe, that the uprising and war against the Persians was at the same time the holy virgin's war against the black goddess. So I felt that I was performing a worthy deed in setting fire to the temple of Cybele...' " [Other refs. not in DB.]

Cybele the Great Mother

world

-445 B.C.E.

Vidal, Gore. Creation. New York: Random House (1981); pg. 111.

"The first bad news arrived during a ceremony at the temple of Cybele. I thought it fitting. After all, I had no business taking part in the rites of a devil-cult but Artaphrenes had insisted that his entire staff join him at the temple. 'We must humor the Lydians. Like us, they are slaves to the Great King. Like us, they are loyal.'

...At Sardis that day, I saw one poor wretch throw his genitals at an open door. Unfortunately, he missed. He then proceeded, slowly, to bleed to death in the roadway, since it is considered blasphemous to come to the aid of a would-be priest of Cybele who has failed to find, as it were, a proper home for his sexuality.

The ceremony to Cybele was endless. The incense was so thick that the image of the tall goddess which stands--stood--in a Grecian-style portico was almost obscured. She was depicted between a lion and a pair of writhing snakes. " [Other refs., not in DB.]

"'Ah, yes, Artist of Untruth,' the Mouser cut in hastily. 'Concerning not so much the concubine as three eunuch priests of Cybele and a slave-girl from Samos--a tasty affair of wondrous complexity...' "

[Frontispiece.] "'You hit the nail on the head,' I told him. 'She was here, once, before either of you l . . she's my Great Mother, Doctor Nisea says. My life is devoted to worshiping Pris as if she were a goddess. I've projected her archetype onto the universe; I see nothing but her. Everything else to me is unreal. This trip we're taking, you two, Doctor Nisea, the whole Kansas City Clinic -- it's all just shadows.'

"I don't mind saying to you that I'm not a full-blood Ojibwa reservation dog. I'm part Dakota, born out in Bwaanakeeng, transported here. "

Dakota

South Dakota

1869

Bethke, Bruce. Wild Wild West. New York: Warner Books (1999); pg. 44.

Pg. 44: "'...the Navajo, the Cheyenne, the Apaches, the Nez Perce, and up in Dakota Territory, Sitting Bull and all those thousands of unhappy Sioux. "; Pg. 164: "'...But that was mostly up in Minnesota and Dakota territory...' "

Pg. 345: "'That's not a Dakota. Marshall would fly in one of those, I think. So it's probably a German plane.' "; Pg. 346: "'That is a Dakota,' Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. 'So--Marshall?--is here, too, now.' "

"Turner sighed and reeled in his line. Behind them, the [abondoned oil] rig's squatter population of Dayak fisherfolk clustered on the old helicopter pad, mending nets and chewing betel-nut... Brunei Town, the sultanate's capital, had a hundred thousand citizens: Malays, Chinese, Ibans, Dayaks, and a sprinkling of Europeans. "

"The front section, with its bare launching rails sloping down to deep water, had once been a Dayak kampong. The Dayaks had spraybombed the concrete-block walls with giant neon-bright murals of banshees dead in childbirth, and leaping cricket-spirits with evil dayglo eyes. "

"They bashed a bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice across the center bow and christened the ship the Mambo Sun. Turner's work crew launched her down the rails and stepped the mats. She was crewed by a family of Dayaks from one of the offshore rigs, an old woman with four sons. They were the dark, beautiful descendants of headhunting pirates, dressed in hand-dyed sanrongs and ancient plastic baseball caps. Their language was utterly incomprehensible. " [See also pg. 350, 372.]

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